Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

time.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 716 posts

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#421

Post by hluska »

coldtea wrote: post #342
bix6 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Katie Sweeten, a former liaison for the Justice Department to the Department of Defense, said she’s not sure how the Pentagon can both declare a company to be a supply chain risk and compel that same company to work with the military. Makes perfect sense!!

Regardless of any specifics, I don't see any contradiction. If a company is deemed a "supply chain risk" it makes perfect sense to compel it to work with the military, assuming the latter will compel them to fix the issues that make them such a risk.

I’m not sure what definition of supply chain risk they’re working off of. For NATO to consider an organization to be a supply chain risk, it implies that usual controls (security clearances and the like) wouldn’t be sufficient to guarantee the integrity and security of the supply chain. If that’s the operating definition, I see the contradiction- it’s arguing that a company cannot be trusted to voluntarily work within supply chains but can be trusted enough to be compelled.

If they’re operating under a different definition of supply chain risk, I don’t have a clue.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#422

Post by xd1936 »

Lerc wrote: post #398
ru552 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the article specifically says: > The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter.

I'm not fond of this trend of stating a position and attributing it to "a source familiar with the situation" It combines interpretation of meaning with ambiguity to allow the reporter to assert anything they want. The ambiguity is there to protect the identity of the source but it has to be a more discrete disclosure of information in return. If you can't check the person you can still check what they said. I would…

I really like how The Verge discusses this.

https://www.theverge.com/press-room/22772113/the-verge-on-ba...

On their podcast, they frequently bring up how tech company PR teams try to move as much conversation with journalists as possible into "on background", uncited, generic sourcing.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#423

Post by ashtonshears »

nradov wrote: post #275
ashtonshears wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are claiming all americans must happily create weapons. Thats a silly statement to most americans and humans

Don't presume to put words in my mouth. I flagged your comment for lying about my claims. Individual Americans aren't slaves. They can do as they please and are under no obligation to help build weapons for warfighters. But I think it's ridiculous and offensive for a US corporation to presume to take on a role as moral arbiters by placing arbitrary limits on US government use of certain products. There are larger iss…

Sure, it wasnt fair for me to claim you said that, so I apologize. It was rude of me to frame my position in that manner, and wasnt intended maliciously.

I meant to suggest that corps being unable to take those positions results in such a world for Americans at those corps

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#424

Post by bparsons »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

That's not what happened here. They literally got forced into it by the Pentagon. https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-pentagon-claude-h...

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#425

Post by the_bear »

ACCount37 wrote: post #414
coldtea wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general public benefit corporations and non-profits should have a very modest salary cap for everybody involved and specific public-benefit legally binding mission statements. Anybody involved should also be prohibited from starting a private company using their IP and catering to the same domain for 5-10 years after they leave. Non-profits where the CEO makes millions or billions are a joke. And if e.g. your miss…

"A very modest salary cap" works if your mission is planting trees. Not so much if what you're building is frontier AI systems.

I think that's the point though. The AI companies can't compete without hiring very talented employees and raising lots of money from investors. Neither the employees nor investors would participate if there weren't the potential for making mountains of money. So these AI companies fundamentally can't be non-profits or true B-corps (I realize that's a vague term, but the it certainly means not doing whatever it takes to make as much money as possible), and they shouldn't pretend they are.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#426

Post by afavour »

shubhamjain wrote: post #352

I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently: > The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter. Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't compreh…

It's exhausting to keep with mainstream AI news because of this. I can never work out if the companies are deluded and truly believe they're about to create a singularity or just claiming they are to reassure investors/convince the public of their inevitability.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#427

Post by boxed »

samjewell wrote: post #392
bhouston wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy from Effective Altruism pivoted away from helping the poor to help try to control AI from being a terminator type entity and then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity. > Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded the EA charity evaluator GiveWell, says that while he used to work on trying to help the poor, he switched to working on artificial intelligence because of the “stakes”: > “The…

> then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity. Isn’t that the opposite of what he’s saying? He’s saying it could become that powerful, and given that possibility it’s incredibly important that we do whatever we can to gain more control of that scenario

I think the poster here has an axe to grind, considering they quoted something that directly contradicted their point and didn't even notice.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#428

Post by kunai »

gordian-mind wrote: post #410
hybrid_study wrote: post #400

Are markets so untamable that the only leverage is to become ultra-rich—and then act philanthropically? Incidentally, concentrated wealth lately looks less like stewardship and more like misanthropy.

Participating in the economic life before re-allocating that wealth produced to philanthropic activities sounds pretty good. Modern concentrated wealth is hardly misanthropic, since it's mostly private equity, that is, companies with people and jobs.

Except this is not the age of the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, who, despite being far more philanthropic than modern-day billionaires, drew ire from every corner of society for their wealth accumulation. It wasn't until the New Deal that the balance shifted.

Unconstrained accumulation of capital into the hands of the few without appropriate investment into labor is illiberal and incompatible with democracy and true freedom. Those of us who are capitalists see surplus value as a compromise to ensure good economic growth. The hidden subtext of that is that all the wealth accumulated needs to be re-allocated to serve not only capital enterprise, but the needs of society as a whole. It's hard to see the current system as appropriate for that given how blindly and wildly investments are made with no DD or going long, or no effort paid to the social or environmental opportunity costs of certain practices.

A lot of this comes down to the crippling of the SEC and FTC, but even then, investors cry and whine every time you suggest reworking the regs to inhibit some of the predatory practices common in this post-80s era of hypernormalization. Our current system does not resemble a healthy capitalist economy at all. It's rife with monopsony and monopolistic competition, inequality of opportunity, and a strained underclass that's responsible for our inverted population pyramid -- how can you have kids when we're so atomized and there is no village to help you? You can raise kids in a nuclear family if and only if you have enough money to do so. Otherwise, historically, people relied on their communities when raising children in less-than-ideal circumstances. Those communities are drying up.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#429

Post by bn_layc »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #404
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

Pete Hegseth also threatened to take, by dictat, everything Anthropic has. He can do that with the Defense Industrial Act or whatever its called if he designates them as critical to national defense.

He seems to be the driving force behind all this. Mediocrities are attracted to AI like moths.

The press always say "the Pentagon negotiates". Does any publication have an evidence that it is "the Pentagon" and not Hegseth? In general, I see a lot of common sense from the real Pentagon as opposed to the Secretary of War.

I hope Westpoint will check for AI psychosis in their entrance interviews and completely forbid AI usage. These people need to be grounded.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#430

Post by nozzlegear »

heavyset_go wrote: post #365
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

PBCs are peak End of History liberal philanthropy that speak to the kind of person whose solution to any problem is "throw a startup at it"

Fukuyama wasn't wrong, he was just early
Post reply on HN